Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  The final minutes of the game were desperate and thrilling. By now, the other morning games had finished, and as word of the stakes in the Fugees-Fire matchup spread around the complex, the parents and players of other teams had gathered on the slight rise alongside the field to watch and cheer. The boys in gold—the team from Warner Robbins, Georgia, who would advance if the Fugees lost their lead—pleaded with the Fire to score one more. But there were others who’d wandered up to the game and who, like TV viewers who stumble upon the final minutes of an otherwise meaningless game and nevertheless make a snap decision to pull for one team over another, drifted toward the set of bleachers where the Fugees’ fans had gathered. With help from the older boys who’d come to watch the 13s play, they quickly learned a few of the Fugees’ names, and so as the Fugees fought to keep their season alive, they experienced the odd sensation of hearing their names called out by strangers.

  “Let’s go, Josiah!”

  “Nice pass, Bien!”

  “Shoot, Jeremiah, shoot!”

  As the final minutes of the game oozed by, the Fire scrambled to get some kind of shot, but they couldn’t find an opening. Prince cleared one ball, Shahir another. Robin was doing his job on defense in shutting down Jorge. During a lull when the ball rolled out of bounds, Qendrim summoned the defense for a quick conference in front of the Fugees’ goal. Eldin, Prince, Robin, and Mohammed put their heads together with him, talking urgently but quietly, hands and arms wagging for emphasis, discussing how they were going to keep the Fire from scoring. It was the sort of scene that happens at countless youth soccer games, and surely looked routine to the new fans the Fugees had recruited in the waning minutes of the game. But of course the reality was more complicated and, perhaps, beautiful. The boys were from Kosovo, Bosnia, Liberia, Sudan, and Iraq. Three months before, Mohammed Mohammed spoke almost no English. Now he and Qendrim were discussing soccer strategy with casual ease.

  The final minutes of the game were chaotic. Spectators were shouting now, and the boys on both the Fire and the Fugees were calling out desperate instructions to one another. As the clock ticked toward zero, the teams traded assaults, but neither could find enough time or open space to take a clean shot. Then, Jorge Pinzon of the Fire got free from Robin, about twenty-five yards from the Fugees’ goal. Mohammed, Prince, and Qendrim converged, and Robin sprinted to catch up. Pinzon must have sensed that he had little time. He squared his shoulders and leaned his body into the shot, which arced beautifully over the players’ heads. Eldin leaped into the air. The ball brushed his hands and deflected just under the bar to tie the game 2–2.

  When the final whistle blew a few moments later, the team on the sideline erupted in cheers. They were advancing to the finals. The Fugees’ season was over.

  “You had ’em,” Luma told the boys after the game. “You had ’em at two to one, and you wouldn’t finish it.

  “You deserved to lose,” she continued. “You didn’t play your best.”

  The Fugees gathered their gear lethargically. Mafoday Jawneh gazed out at the empty field.

  “We lost, I mean, we tied our game,” he said. “It was so—” Mafoday interrupted himself and his eyes dropped to the ground.

  “I don’t know what it was,” he said.

  THE HOLIDAYS WERE a festive time in Clarkston. The boys got a break from school, and since few had anywhere to go, they passed the time shuttling between one another’s apartments, playing video games and hanging out. Luma and Tracy baked cookies and dropped them off for Mayor Swaney at City Hall with a card bearing a photo of the Fugees—a gesture of thanks for his support in their quest to use Armistead Field. A few days before Christmas, Santa Claus came by helicopter to Clarkston City Hall. Mayor Swaney was there to greet him, and in the crowd of kids who’d gathered, some of the Fugees milled about and took in the odd sight of a man with a white beard and red suit who traveled by chopper.

  The Fugees also had work to do. Luma had told them that she would enter the Under 13s and Under 15s in a big tournament to be held in Savannah in January, on the condition that the boys raised the one thousand dollars necessary for travel and lodging. She helped them organize car washes in the parking lot of the YMCA, but the boys had come up $130 short of their goal. Luma held fast. If they didn’t have the money, she said, they weren’t going. When someone suggested they ask their parents for the money, Luma told the boys that any player who asked a parent for tournament money would be kicked off the Fugees.

  “You need to ask yourselves what you need to do for your team,” she told them.

  “YOU NEED TO ask yourself what you need to do for your team,” Jeremiah said. He was on the phone with Prince, spreading the word about a team project. The boys were going to rake leaves to make that extra $130. The boys figured they could knock on doors in town and offer their services. There was no need to tell Coach about their plan, unless they raised enough cash. Some of the older boys had agreed to help out. It was time to get to work.

  In the evening, Luma’s cell phone rang. It was Eldin. He wanted to know if she could pick up Grace and take him home. They’d been raking leaves all day, and he was too tired to walk the two miles up the road to his apartment complex. And oh yeah, Eldin said, he wanted to give her the money.

  “What money?” Luma asked.

  “You said we needed a hundred and thirty dollars,” he told her. “So we’ve got a hundred and thirty dollars.”

  LUMA RELISHED A few days of rest during the holidays. She spent Christmas visiting her players’ families and delivering boxes of food. The day after Christmas, Luma received a fax on the Town of Clarkston’s letterhead. The letter, dated December 26, was addressed to the “Fugees Soccer Team.”

  Dear Coaching Staff (Luma Mufleh and Tracy Ediger):

  This letter is to serve immediate notice that the activity/ball fields located at Milam Park and Armistead fields will no longer be available due to the cities [sic] reactivation of its youth recreation program that will be administered through a local organization. We sincerely hope that the time allotted for the teams [sic] practice was useful and productive for the coaching staff and the players alike.

  Luma was stunned. The city council had voted unanimously to grant the Fugees six months’ use of the field in October—just over three months ago. Luma called Mayor Swaney at City Hall, but he wouldn’t take or return her call.

  It didn’t take much in the way of probing to discover that the letter—signed by a city official named M. W. Shipman but authorized, as the mayor would later admit, by Mayor Lee Swaney himself—was as full of holes as the mayor’s earlier attempts to keep soccer out of the town park. For one thing, the mayor had no authority to single-handedly contravene the city council’s vote to let the Fugees use the field for six months—a vote, after all, he himself had insisted on when others had wondered if a less formal arrangement might have sufficed. His letter, one council member asserted, was simply illegal. But further, no one on the city council seemed to know anything at all about the “reactivation” of the Clarkston youth sports program. The City hadn’t voted to authorize or fund such a plan, and when pressed, the mayor wasn’t willing to get into specifics. He refused, for example, to cite the “local organization” that was going to take over, or to explain why no one on the council had heard about the program that only they could authorize. Later, the mayor would change his story entirely. It wasn’t the reactivation of the youth sports program that had caused him to kick the Fugees off the field, he would say. Rather, he explained, he had seen some adult refugees playing soccer in the park and had assumed they were affiliated with the Fugees. He had kicked the Fugees out of the park, the story now went, for violating the terms of its agreement with the city. But that argument didn’t hold up either. The Fugees had no affiliation with any adult soccer players, as the mayor well knew. Luma had provided City Hall with a roster of her teams, along with their ages. Any confusion over the issue, of course, could have been cleared up with a simple phone call
, but the only communication Luma had from Mayor Swaney or the town government of Clarkston came in the form of that fax the day after Christmas. For reasons only he knew, Lee Swaney just didn’t want refugees playing soccer in Milam Park.

  These details and inconsistencies would take a while to reveal themselves. In the meantime, Luma had a tournament to prepare for, and she needed a place to practice. That evening, she logged on to Google Earth once again and scanned satellite images of Clarkston. There it was: a small southern town, cut through by railroad tracks and abutting the river of concrete that was I-285. You could easily make out Thriftown and City Hall and all those apartment complexes—shadowed squares and rectangles around half-empty ponds of asphalt. There were a few green patches visible from the sky. Luma knew those well: the fields at the community center and in Milam Park. Those were off-limits, of course. The field behind Indian Creek Elementary leaped off the screen—a glowing white bowl of chalk that from above looked like some sort of quarry. And that was about it. Amid the gas stations, strip malls, fast food joints, and the tangle of roads and highways, open space in Clarkston was hard to find. Pull back the view and the familiar landmarks of Clarkston grow indistinct. Atlanta encroaches, and seems to swallow the little town. There was plenty of open space in the city’s big parks and in the suburbs, outside of Clarkston—and out of reach for the Fugees. That was frustrating. Pull back farther, and you get a sense of where Clarkston sits on the great expanse of America—tucked in a verdant corner of the country beneath the rippling gray ridges of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Pull back again, and the blue oceans come into view, then other continents and countries—Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq—all looking deceptively serene. Pull back farther still and the curved horizons of the planet reveal themselves—a beautiful ball of green, white, blue, slate, and brown, ringed by a hazy corona. Someday, somewhere down there, the Fugees would find a home.

  Epilogue

  On a fall afternoon not quite two years later, Hassan al-Mufleh sat at the dining room table of Luma’s house just outside the Clarkston city limits. His daughter was out back reading on a rare quiet Sunday after a morning game. Inside, Hassan was trying to stifle tears.

  I’d asked him if he had any regrets over how things had gone between himself and his daughter when she told him she’d be staying in the United States.

  “I hate to remember how she felt being alone in the States,” he said, his voice breaking. “It was difficult for me, but it was more difficult for her. She was twenty-one years old—”

  Hassan became overwhelmed.

  “I should have left her alone,” he said finally.

  Luma’s grandmother Munawar had always urged her to be patient with her parents. She believed that in time they would come to forgive her for deciding not to return to Jordan, and as with so many things, Munawar was right in her quiet wisdom. There were phone conversations, and eventually Hassan and Sawsan, Luma’s mother, visited the United States to see their daughter and the new home she had created for herself. On one of those visits, Hassan had offered to buy Luma new clothes, but she declined. If you want to spend your money, she told her father, come with me. They got in Luma’s yellow Beetle and went to Target, the department store, with a list of school supplies for the Fugees. Luma put together bags of pens and notebooks and binders, and happily stuck her father with the bill. Hassan began to understand.

  There was still hurt. The hardest thing, he said, was living so far from his daughter.

  “We’ve had some very bad days when Luma was away from us,” Hassan said of himself and his wife. “But you have to let go. Now it’s easy for me to say. I’m older, I’m more experienced. We have a saying. Everything in the world starts small and then becomes bigger—except bad things. They start big, and then get smaller.”

  IN THE MONTHS following the Fugees’ 2006 season, a number of big things grew smaller, more manageable. Paula Balegamire, Grace’s mother, learned in a cell phone call from Kinshasa that her husband, Joseph, had not been injured in the riot at Makala after all. Some months later, Joseph was free. He promptly left Congo—which recently descended once again into civil war—and hopes to reunite with his family, either in the U.S. or Europe.

  Mandela and Luma made up. The rapprochement took place gradually, rather than at any sort of intense heart-to-heart meeting. Jeremiah, Mandela’s younger brother, began to call Luma after the U15 games to ask about the scores. Jeremiah had never shown much interest in the outcomes of the older boys’ games, so Luma rightly deduced that Mandela was putting his younger brother up to the calls. Mandela wanted to know how his former team and his old teammates were doing. As tough as Luma could be, as absolute as she was in enforcing her own rules, she didn’t hold grudges. That wasn’t her way. She started talking to Mandela again, advising him. She told him she thought it would be a good idea to get away from Clarkston and from Prince and some of his other friends who were dropping out of school. She suggested he apply for Job Corps, a U.S. government program that provides vocational training to people between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, and that offered the chance to earn a high school degree. There was a Job Corps program in Kentucky, she said, far away from the bad crowd in Clarkston. Luma dropped off an application at the Ziatys’ apartment and told Mandela that if he wanted to go, he’d have to fill out the application himself. A few weeks passed before Mandela called. He’d filled out the paperwork. He wanted to go. Mandela was accepted, and shipped out soon to Kentucky. He studied construction as his vocation and in November 2008 graduated with his high school diploma.

  There were other academic success stories among the 2006 Fugees. Shamsoun, Natnael, and Yousph were all accepted at Pfeiffer University, a liberal arts college in North Carolina. Shamsoun received a scholarship to play soccer at Pfeiffer and since enrolling has been working with a pastor from his village in the Nuba Mountains to someday start a school for Moro children. Through family and friends in the Sudanese community, Shamsoun raised more than $2,000 in order to attend the inauguration of President Barack Obama with a student group.

  Shahir Anwar, of the Under 13 Fugees, was accepted at Paideia School, a private school in an affluent Atlanta neighborhood, on scholarship. Many of the Fugees have seen their grades improve as they have become more familiar with English, and have taken advantage of the program’s tutoring sessions. Luma’s hunch that soccer could serve as a carrot to goad young refugee children into the hard work necessary to succeed in a new country has in many cases proven correct. But there are still enormous challenges. Kids fall away or get dropped from the program if they don’t meet academic expectations. And the local public schools continue to fail the refugee population—and American students as well. The angriest I think I ever saw Luma was when one of her young players proudly showed her his report card, which revealed an A in English. From tutoring sessions, Luma knew the boy was almost completely illiterate.

  THERE HAVE BEEN departures—from the program and from Clarkston. For many refugee families, Clarkston is just a first stop in America, a place to get a foothold before moving on to secondary migration centers in the United States. Liberians, for example, often moved to Iowa, Somalis to Minneapolis or Lewiston, Maine, and Sudanese to Omaha, Nebraska, to seek out the support of communities comprised of family, friends, and countrymen. In the summer of 2007, Beatrice Ziaty decided to leave Clarkston for Iowa, taking young Jeremiah with her while Mandela was in Job Corps in Kentucky. Generose decided to move her three boys, Alex, Bienvenue, and Ive, and her little girl, Alyah, to Fort Wayne, Indiana, a place, she had heard, where life was quieter and safer than Atlanta. Kanue Biah decided to try out for the Silverbacks, the elite Atlanta soccer club, and made the team, while Qendrim left the Fugees because he could no longer get rides to and from Clarkston from his family’s apartment outside of town.

  At first, these sorts of departures wounded Luma. She had poured so much energy into her program and into bettering the lives of her players and their families that a paren
t’s decision to move or a player’s decision to give up soccer or to join another team felt like a profound rejection. Sometimes Luma was angered by what she believed was the naïveté behind such moves, as when Generose decided to give up the safety net Luma had helped create for her boys in order to move to Indiana, a place with limited employment opportunities for a Burundian refugee who spoke no English and where Generose knew just one person—a woman she’d met in a refugee camp. Luma tried to cope with the departures, as best she could. She understood that the refugees were doing the best they could, and that it was difficult to second-guess a mother’s instinct to seek a better environment. Clarkston, after all, was neither the safest nor the most comfortable place to raise a family. And moving by choice—as opposed to simply fleeing—could be an act of self-determination.

  In their new homes, the families Luma worked with are settling in, once again, to new lives. The moves can be jarring for everyone, but especially so for children who are just getting used to life in Atlanta, though in the case of eight-year-old Ive, his family’s move to Indiana wasn’t as difficult as he had feared it might be.

  “Hey, guess what?” Ive said excitedly by phone soon after his family had arrived in Fort Wayne.

  “I don’t know—what?” I said.

  “Indiana,” Ive declared, “is in America.”

  “I know—it’s in the Midwest.”